The sex wars have begun anew – and this time, they've gone global. As if restrictions on free-flowing information weren't already unsexy enough, the Chinese government has upped the ante by cracking down on pornography and "vulgarity" across the country.

Almost instantly, the move was roundly condemned by free-speech advocates. Depending who you asked, it was a blow to free expression, a setback for grassroots media or a gross invasion of privacy. And virtually everyone agreed that the punishment seemed wildly inappropriate for the offence of poor taste and the occasional bit of self-abuse.

While plenty of people oppose pornography (most famously, savvy feminist academics like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) very few people leap to the defence of the strict policing or draconian punishments of this particular episode. It wasn't the manufacturers of pornography who got caught in the dragnet, or the models, actors, filmmakers or photographers, or even the viewers themselves, but the search engines that knowingly or unknowingly host the offending pages. As a result, 19 companies – including major players like Baidu and Google – are subject to being raided and having their equipment seized. As of this morning, more than 1,250 websites had been shuttered, and the ministry of public security announced plans to expand the crackdown to police individuals' mobile phones.

But really, who are we to talk? While pornography isn't illegal in the UK, restrictions aren't that different at Oxford – or really, any of the UK's other bastions of learning. According to Oxford's information technology policy, like other universities on the government-funded JANET programme, "the creation, transmission, storage, downloading, or display of any offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing images, data, or other material, or any data capable of being resolved into such images or material" is a punishable offence for users on university networks. Cambridge's policy is similar, as is Manchester's. King's College lumps porn into a range of reactionary offences; by banning content "which is sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, pornographic or similarly discriminatory or offensive" they skilfully blur the lines between self-love and hate speech. As quick as commentators have been to condemn the crackdown in China, our intelligentsia don't seem to be any less squeamish about porn themselves.

It's not just this instance, either. Just prior to China's sweeps, pundits were up in arms over Facebook's ban of breastfeeding photos. But while Oxford or Cambridge might let the photos slide, they're not necessarily permissible. As the policies stand, universities in the UK not only prohibit displaying racy photos on their networks, they often prohibit uploading and sending them privately in the sanctity of a university room.

Obviously, there's a non-trivial difference in scale between China's crackdown and a fed-up IT technician who reports a student to a university. It's said that Oxford rarely enforces its policy, and certainly, nobody has their belongings confiscated or gets detained indefinitely for breaking that particular rule. Moreover, Oxford – like many institutions – does explicitly allow students to access racy materials for "properly supervised research purposes", although the policy neglects to say what constitutes a properly supervised use of porn, or what unlucky group of bureaucrats is asked to evaluate such claims.

If it's trivial or impractical to regulate, why ban porn at all? Many universities argue that surfing for porn is banned because it's not for academic purposes. But this hardly explains why students are only lectured on porn as they are introduced to the network. Nobody worries that they'll be sent down for shopping for jeans, emailing their grandmother or checking a bus schedule. And frankly, they probably get more out of the porn. It's hard to single out pornography as uniquely anti-intellectual – and it certainly doesn't make sense to ban it at universities where students regularly skip to bops in schoolgirl miniskirts or fetish gear.

But what such vague and imprecise prohibitions do promote is a kind of self-consciousness, fearfulness, and shame about accessing content that might be damning. Worse, they allow the university to crack down on whoever it chooses, whenever it chooses, with whatever punishments it chooses. It lends itself to targeting people who watch porn often, or who are into kinky stuff that catches the university's eye. That's especially arbitrary to those of us who think porn is pretty innocuous compared to the rampant misogyny or violence that you can watch unrestricted on TV, but the sheer inconsistency of it should give even critics of pornography pause. Pornography can be sexist and it can be offensive, but it isn't inherently so – and if porn offends, so does a lot of the material on the internet. And for institutions that prize curiosity and free thought, a blanket prohibition on net-based erotica alone seems awfully difficult to justify.

The politics of pornography are complicated everywhere, in the UK just as much as in China. But a key difference between the two is that porn isn't illegal in Britain, and that's what makes this puritanical streak in academia especially incomprehensible. It's frankly bizarre for universities to distribute contraception and test for chlamydia while banning porn – to effectively tell students that they can touch, but not look. While pornography might be distasteful to some, that kind of sex schizophrenia that persists in its place is a much bigger turn-off.